The world could suffer a 40 percent shortfall in water in just 15 years unless countries dramatically change their use of the resource, a U.N. report warned Friday.

The report predicts global water demand will increase 55 percent by 2050, while reserves dwindle. If current usage trends don't change, the world will have only 60 percent of the water it needs in 2030, it said.

Celia W. Dugger, deputy science editor for health, has helped to coordinate the Times’s coverage of Ebola. She edited a feature published Tuesday on the origin of this year’s Ebola outbreak, and shares how the story came together after months of reporting.

As the Ebola epidemic gained velocity this fall, spreading fear and death across one of the world’s poorest regions, I kept coming back to the same questions: How did this one get away? How did the experts — and the media, including editors like me, for that matter — miss the signs in the spring that this time would be catastrophically different from the nearly two dozen prior outbreaks? Why did the most seasoned Ebola hands — men and women who had repeatedly risked their lives battling this lethal foe — let their guard down and scale back in May just when the virus might have been throttled?

AMRAVATI, India — A deadly epidemic that could have global implications is quietly sweeping India, and among its many victims are tens of thousands of newborns dying because once-miraculous cures no longer work.

As a means of concluding these writings on Structural Adaptivity and Resilience, following are some of the background thoughts, with recent revision, that led me to my proposals. Originally, my writings were directed at city and regional planning. However now I realize they are also about resilience. I hope my submittals will be helpful. I will try to write more soon.

Time. Planners, resilience makers, and all other leaders and professionals dealing with the built environment must focus on long time spans. In order to have significant impact on the future of our world, we must recognize that only by looking at big chunks of history and big chunks of future time can we really see the reality of what is going on. Likewise, we need to do so in order to see the reality of what needs to be done.

Typical urban or regional plans target a future some 20 years ahead. Moreover, they typically are based on past trends of 20 years or so. However, our world does not change in 20-year cycles. Twenty years is a very short time period in the flow of transformation.

ATLANTA — As Thomas Eric Duncan's family mourns the USA's first Ebola death in Dallas, one question reverberates over a series of apparent missteps in the case: Who is in charge of the response to Ebola?

The answer seems to be — there really isn't one person or agency. There is not a single national response.

The Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has emerged as the standard-bearer — and sometimes the scapegoat — on Ebola.

Public health is the purview of the states, and as the nation anticipates more Ebola cases, some experts say the way the United States handles public health is not up to the challenge.

Here are my last three Facilitation Examples, proposed activities by planners and others to influence the development of the built environment toward structural adaptivity and resilience as we progress into an ever more uncertain and unpredictable future.

Rethinking Homeownership. Conventional owner-occupied land and buildings in the US many times tie the owners into long-term tenures. It makes moves, to other locations, overly cumbersome even when such moves are in the occupants’ best interests. Adaptivity requires the ability to make quicker changes than in the past, including the self-initiated movement of people and businesses to other locations when beneficial. Alternative types of ownership or tenure must be facilitated, types which are more adaptable to quick change.

By Friday morning, we knew more. These details, the stuff of horror films. A local government group of relief workers—a mix of doctors, religious leaders, and journalists—had arrived Monday to educate the remote southeastern village of Womey about Ebola. Just 24 hours after their arrival, violence broke out, allegedly sparked by the false belief that a disinfectant being sprayed was actually the disease itself. An angry mob brandishing machetes, stones, and knives lashed out.

MONROVIA, Liberia — While the terrifying spread of Ebola has captured the world’s attention, it also has produced a lesser-known crisis: the near-collapse of the already fragile health-care system here, a development that may be as dangerous — for now — as the virus for the average Liberian.

Western experts said that people here are dying of preventable or treatable conditions such as malaria, diarrhea, pneumonia and the effects of high blood pressure and diabetes, such as strokes. Where services do exist, Ebola has complicated the effort to provide them by stoking fear among health-care workers, who sometimes turn away sick people or women in labor if they can’t determine whether the patient is infected. And some people, health-care workers said, will not seek care, fearful that they will become infected with Ebola at a clinic or hospital.

In writing about the importance of promoting private enterprise, as well as in many other sections of my work, I suggested an almost near certainty that the risk management industry eventually will facilitate resilience and structural adaptivity in our built environment. In my larger draft, I included a short section about this, which I am posting below (somewhat revised). I believe it is beneficial to share this section now in order to explain my optimism for resilience. (I also wrote short sections on Time, Rapid Change, Optimism, A Futurist Perspective, and The Human Factor but do not necessarily intend to post them here.)

The future will be all about risk and trying to find protection from the rapidly increasing threats to our world as we advance in population size, social/cultural/economic complexity, and cutting-edge science and technology. Risk underwriting will play a big role in how well or how poorly we adapt to accelerating change.